Jet Set Willy
Platform: Commodore 64
Gametype: Undefined
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Cult hero Matthew Smith followed up Manic Miner with a seminal platform game. Having struck it lucky in the first game, Willy now owns a lavish mansion with over 60 rooms linked in a 3D plane, and must tidy it all before his housekeeper will let him sleep.

Each room has its own hazards, such as spikes, revolving razors and ropes. The route through the house must be navigated carefully, due to the multiple entrances to some rooms - this is perhaps the first action game where mapping is an advantage. Another innovation, to the chagrin of players everywhere, is manual protection - a sheet of colour-coded numbers.

Alternate Titles
"La Casa de Jack" -- Spanish title

Trivia

 The Amstrad version of Jet Set Willy was the original official expansion of Jet Set Willy by Software Projects. This expansion was written by Derrick P. Rowson and Steve Wetheril, and contains 132 rooms. This expanded version is the basis of Jet Set Willy II: The Final Frontier. 

 The author of Jet Set Willy wrote the game and its predecessor Manic Miner before he was 18. 

 The music playing in the background is If I were a Rich Man from the US Broadway musical Fiddler on the Roof, first performed in 1964. 

 Circa 1989, Paul Taylor and Carl Whitwell worked on an Atari ST conversion of this game for Software Projects -- late enough in the title's life that the painstaking port (disassembled code read off the Spectrum's monitor and typed into the Atari's keyboard, screen data dumped as hex and dictated to a typist) was never released to the commercial market. During the same period Shahid Ahmad worked on an Amiga port that met a similar fate of obscurity. 

Awards

Retro Gamer Magazine
Issue 37 - #6 in the "Top 25 Platformers of All Time" (poll)
Happy Computer 
Issue 04/1985 - #3 Best Game in 1984 (Readers' Vote) (Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum version)

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Help Willy explore his mansion, and solve the mysteries of the deeper recesses of his house.
Willy, intrepid explorer and nouveau riche socialite, has been reaping the benefits of the jet-set lifestyle. He has a yacht, a mansion, an Italian housekeeper, and a French cook. After one recent bash, Maria the maid decided that Willy could not crash in his rooms until he had cleaned all the discarded bottles and glasses. As he begins his clean-up, Willy explores his mansion and discovers some very strange things (what was the last owner doing in the laboratory?). All you can lose in this game is sleep.
Get acquainted with the whole line of Gameware software soon. It's all affordable, high quality, copyrighted software, complete with documentation. In short, it's something you just can't afford to pass up.



http://www.mobygames.com/game/c64/jet-set-willy
